Crucial updates faulty firmware on M4 SSDs

Crucial has recently released a firmware update to take care of a firmware fault in the M4 SSDs.

Last month, the Crucial M4 SSD, a product highly rated by enthusiasts, encountered a rather disconcerting issue when their user’s computers started reporting BSOD’s with the 0x00000f4 error code. While the data on the drive didn’t appear to be affected, once the problem started, it persisted several times following every restart.

This issue later turned out to be a firmware fault which caused the drive to report such errors when passed the 5200 operational hours mark. Any other factor appeared not to matter, only the total Power On Hours.

Fortunately enough, Crucial promised an update which they did provide, with the following log:

Changes made in version 0002 (m4 can be updated to revision 0309 directly from either revision 0001, 0002, or 0009)

Correct a condition where an incorrect response to a SMART counter will cause the m4 drive to become unresponsive after 5184 hours of Power-on time. The drive will recover after a power cycle, however, this failure will repeat once per hour after reaching this point. The condition will allow the end user to successfully update firmware, and poses no risk to user or system data stored on the drive.

Crucial strongly recommends this update to be made even if users have not encountered the issue yet.

However, SAS Expander users are instructed not to download this firmware, Crucial will release another firmware update that will work in these applications.